September 27, 2007

Enterprise mashups have reached the peak of their hype cycle and are on their way to popping up in the enterprise.ADVERTISEMENTMany companies looking to cull data from multiple sources to help their employees do their jobs better are seeking mashups as an answer, said Anthony Bradley, a Gartner analyst, Sept. 21 at the Gartner Web Innovation Summit 2007 here.

Mashups are applications that pull data from multiple sources, often applications, to fortify the value of the information the software yields. Calling mashups a Frankenstein of sorts, Gartner analyst Bradley said mashups don’t own their own data. Rather, data and business logic are sourced externally.

As with many Internet-driven technologies, mashups got their wings in the consumer space, with enterprising programmers splicing Google Maps with retail information or some such configuration.But Bradley said businesses are increasingly using mashups to improve workflow efficiencies at a time when knowledge workers are looking to get information faster. The major benefit of mashups is rapid application development, he said.

We’re not surprise to to see this at all. It makes a lot of sense for all sizes of business to take advantage of Mashups to make access to no only make working with inter-related data easier, but also to build new applications that can help their business or which they can use to promote their business.

September 22, 2007

The number of IT contractor roles in Britain’s finance industry will inevitably decline amid jitters from the Northern Rock credit crisis, a leading IT jobs agency said yesterday.

A management expert also said shock waves from the lender’s implosion will shake the finance jobs market for at least the next 18 months, with IT staff budgets among the hardest hit.But global IT recruitment firm Hudson says demand for financial IT experts could slump as early as this year, causing pay rates to plateau, before they further depress into 2008.

A slowdown in temporary IT jobs looks like an inevitability, the firm said.Economic pressure on IT staff budgets would revert market status to five years ago, when contractors were mainly hired for niche roles, rather than to fill headcount.But for now, there is no evidence that end users facing the shaken finance industry are cutting their spending on IT contractors, consultants or freelancers.

Similarly, contractors themselves aren’t refusing IT roles with financers, but they are asking questions about how these companies responded to the turmoil, Hudson added.Another IT recruitment agency, CV Screen, doesn’t foresee Britain’s financial woes as having a “sudden impact” on permanent or contract IT recruitment.Its managing director, Matthew Iveson, said: “It would be naïve to think that the current credit crunch will not have some impact on the employment market.“But the current signs are that organisations are still feeling bullish and have not put [IT] projects on hold. We are continuing to field enquiries from both existing and new clients.”Positively for the economy, management and IT consultants are yet to be bitten by Britain’s banking crisis, hailed as the most embarrassing for over a decade.

Fiona Czerniawska, director of a thinktank for the Management Consultancies Association, which represents 70 per cent of the UK consulting industry, said confidence among members remains high.“Capital markets is quite a niche segment,” for UK-based consultants, she added, “much smaller than banking and insurance, so it’s unlikely firms would be heavily exposed here.“Longer-term, however, it’s clearly a situation we need to keep an eye on, as it might be the first sign that the recent boom in consulting may have peaked.”

WikiScanner is a new tool that effectively polices the entries on Wikipedia. The tool simply looks at the millions of edits made on the online encyclopedia and then matches the original IP address of the editor to check whether any entries were “massaged”.

Not surprisingly a minority showed signs of being massaged, in particular there were changes made to the entry for ExxonMobile the global oil company, The edits tried to play down the impact of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil disaster. Other changes that were linked back to corporate IP addresses were Wal-Mart, who edit made salary information look more favourable, and links critical of Starbucks, the coffee shop, disappearing.

Fact – never believe what you read online – always double or even triple check the source…..

The £300 million project to cut thd 3 day wait for clearing payments at high-street banks has been delayed by 6 months. Vocalink, who are developing the service, came across an issue in testing and are now to delay the service until May 2008

A “technical breakdown” meant that Barclays Bank had to apply for an emergency £1.6 billion loan from the Bank of England. Barclays blamed the ther eason on a malfunction with the Bank’s inter-settlement system, Crest. This left the Bank temporarily unable to cover its positions in the market.

Concerns over liquidity in the global financial markets certainly seem justified with the admission of facts coming out of high street banks over the last month…

September 19, 2007

SAN FRANCISCO—Salesforce.com is rolling out two new applications that are designed to extend its application set from four to six, but will still keep the company rooted to its origins: CRM.The new Salesforce Content and Ideas applications, announced at the company’s Dreamforce user conference here Sept. 17, will grow the use of Salesforce.com’s applications from what might typically be the sales, support and marketing teams—and IT, as Salesforce creeps ever deeper into the platform market—to just about any department within an enterprise.

Salesforce Content, for example, provides a raft of Web 2.0 technologies—tagging, subscriptions, recommendations—that help users to manage unstructured data. Salesforce Ideas is a service that enables companies to build communities where participants can post and vote on ideas.Based on its own experience with IdeaExchange, a Web page on the Salesforce.com site that lets just about anyone post ideas for upgrades and rate other ideas—and where much of Salesforce.com’s development initiatives stem from—Ideas enables customers to build online communities where participants can submit, discuss and promote concepts around such issues as software development. Salesforce officials said in a statement that its own internal use of IdeaExchange has “changed the face of development,” with customers and partners shaping future product releases in live debates. To date, more than 5,000 ideas have been posted and “numerous” ideas have been incorporated into Salesforce applications.

September 15, 2007

Online retailer eXpansys has acqyired YooNoo Ltd for a total of £1.2 million. YooNoo owned http://www.globalpositioningsystems.co.uk amongst other sites making YooNoo the marekt-leading retailer of satnav systems in the UK.

September 13, 2007

Billions of dollars of ‘sub-prime’ loans to homebuyers with poor credit records have been lost to defaults in the US. This has had a huge knock-on effect in the UK, especially on Credit Derivatives, which have hit the wall due to the fact that they didn’t escalate their risk position. This ultimately leads to lower revenues for the banks.

What does this mean for software vendors who sell in the Financial Services industry ? Short term pain I’m afraid. Projects have been postphoned and in some cases cancelled, and there is an expectation that consultants and developers on contracts will be released onto the market at the end of the year when their contracts expire.

It’s not all doom and gloom, vendors who have products that cater into Commodities, FX. Equities, and Prime Service (Extended Services to Hedge Funds) may still be able to prosper, but in general it could take up to 9-12 months for the market to settle again.

September 7, 2007

TomTom has made a bid to buy map provider Tele Atlas worth around $1.2 billion. Any potential deal would give TomTom a major new revenue source licensing its product to third parties. Google Maps is among the systems using Tele Atlas software at present.